Michael Mckinnon

Michael McKinnon began his first experiments in light and motion at the Plastics Research Department in the Royal College of Art and was co-founder of the Continuum group of artists, with Daniel Leonelli and Robert Janz, in the early 1970s.

In McKinnon’s Liquidisc sculpture, shown as part of the Life Forms exhibition at Kinetica, his emphasis is on the complexities of change and interaction within the system he has created, its defining elements being liquid, colour, catchment area and rotation speed. It is the continuous creation and alteration within these elements that interests him artistically, rather than its sculptural static state, which he considers to simply be the first phase of its life cycle. When the Liquidisc is in motion, the emphasis shifts to the transformations occurring within the sculpture and to the nature of the changes themselves. The work is never complete at any given moment, for while the artist’s control extends to the division of areas and the operations that will act upon these elements, there has been no final assertion as to their best possible arrangement. The totality of each rotation is seen to be the experience in time of the entirety of the process, the total experience being the sum of its phases, in an endless sequence of configurations.